Weekend Best Bets Ben Cosgrove tunes into landscapes

Ben Cosgrove will perform his environmentally inspired music at 6:30 p.m at the Fitchburg Public Library.

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FITCHBURG -- Ben Cosgrove will present original music inspired by the landscapes he has studied at 6:30 p.m. at the Fitchburg Public Library on Main Street.

"My family all live in Fitchburg and the Montachusett area. I have a special affection for that region," Cosgrove said by phone from Cambridge.

"I'll be playing music that I've written from all over the country," he said. "Music from my last few albums and music not even recorded yet -- and my grandmother's coming,"

A pianist and composer, he enjoys playing intimate spaces like the Fitchburg Library because it feels more like a conversation. Along with his latest CDs, he'll have on hand his book of essays about people and places, including environmental history.

Cosgrove, who lives in the Boston area, had just gotten back from a concert in Maine and was preparing to head out to a gig in Vermont. He recently finished a year-long residency in the White Mountains in New Hampshire.

He recalls being "kind of a weird little kid" who was interested in vultures as a toddler. Though most little kids tote teddy bears, Cosgrove had a different kind of affinity.

"I carried around a plastic bust of Beethoven that went everywhere with me," he said. The bust, he said, "is probably in Fitchburg, and you'll be happy to know that I don't know for certain where it is now."

Cosgrove, who spent much of his childhood exploring the woods around Mount Monadnock, started playing the piano due to a serendipitous circumstance.

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When he was four, his family moved to Methuen, and the house's previous owners had an old upright they didn't want to take with them.

"Apparently I was picking out melodies on it, so my parents decided to get me lessons. I quickly got deeply into it, and by the time I was five or six it had largely consumed my life," he said.

Cosgrove studied with the same teacher, Mrs. Schmidt, in Andover until he was 18. She gave him free rein and helped him to explore his tastes and a variety of genres. Sometimes that meant figuring out a pop song he'd heard.

"She had precisely the right personality and teaching approach for me," he said.

When Cosgrove left to study at Harvard University, he began to consider his love for music and his interest in the environment. His exposure to popular, classical, rock, jazz, blues and more laid the groundwork for what was to come. Possibilities for a new way to approach composing began to bubble up. He was featured in Harvard Magazine in "Listen to the Landscape: Composer Ben Cosgrove Connects Sound and Place."

"Landscape and music ... I have always loved being outside, and I have these longstanding interests in nature and environmental science," he said.

During his academic career, he became deeply interested in how people form relationships with their particular landscapes and explored how he might express that experience through music. When he graduated, he got a short internship in a record studio in Iceland. He came back to Cambridge late that summer ready to go out on his own.

"I wanted to see if I could get by doing various musical odd jobs," he said. He played a lot of cocktail piano and scored several student films. He also played with a few bands.

"This magically added up to rent each month," Cosgrove said. At the end at of that year, he got a fellowship from Middlebury College to write about natural sounds and noise management in the country's national parks.

"I spent several months traveling around the country talking to scientists, musicians, and sound artists in Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, and the Rockies," he said.

During that trip, he started booking gigs in between destinations to make back his gas money. Cosgrove said he found the arrangement wildly gratifying, emotionally and logistically.

"In a way, it was my first tour," he said. "I've more or less been on the road ever since."

Since then, he has served as the Signet Artist-in-Residence Fellow at Harvard University from 2012 to 2014, and received the St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award.

In addition, he held residencies and fellowships at Acadia National Park, Isle Royale National Park, Middlebury College, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. He was the 2015-2016 artist in residence at White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire and Maine.

He composes string and horn arrangements for others' projects and has recorded original music for clients including Grand Teton National Park, WHRB and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. His essays have been published in several journals and he is the assistant editor of The Ecomusicology Newsletter and an associate editor of the Ethnomusicology Review.

Cosgrove said his music about place is really about the human experience in that place.

"There's something fundamentally different about the way you feel at the top of a mountain or at the bottom of a canyon or in the streets of a city, and it can be hard to articulate those feelings verbally," he said.

"The instrumental music I was writing seemed like it could be a great tool for exploring those ideas. I love that music can be this thing that can be molded and shaped around the other interests I have."

He cites "Abilene," a song inspired by a drive he made across Kansas.

"You can never see that far in New England, or feel that vulnerable sense of openness," he said.

Instead of putting the experience into words, he composed an interpretive score driven by fast tempos and arranged in broad harmonies.

"It feels slightly out of control and yet the melody moves slowly within it, expressing my reaction to that landscape in a very abstract way," he said.

A year spent researching the preservation of natural soundscapes in America's national parks helped shaped much of his new material, he said. He worries that the North American soundscape is "becoming clouded with drones and mechanized noise." He is trying to capture and preserve the diverse sounds of each region he visits, painting not with a brush, but with sound and rhythm.

He hopes that sharing these musical montages of myriad places might encourage people to listen more closely to the environments in which they move, to hear landscapes through the music.

"An apartment building, a forest, a beach, an alley, a mountain, or wherever -- it seems to me that only good can from strengthening your connection to the land [spaces] around you, whatever it is," he said.

In 2014, he released "Field Studies," which considers the human experience of many kinds of physical landscapes across North America, using field recordings and musical arrangements, weaving melodies inspired by deserts, wilderness lakes, prairies, mountain ranges, coastlines, and sprawling suburbs. Sound of Boston named it one of the best local albums released that year."

Cosgrove said he will always travel but would like to eventually settle down.

"At the moment that's a bit logistically tricky," he said, pointing out that much of his income comes from performances, and that keeps him moving around.

For him, music is just another way of communicating and he hopes his musical interpretation of a particular region's landscape will resonate with listeners in ways that will increase awareness, appreciation, even preservation.

"I hope whoever listens will find some point of connection with it or react meaningfully to it in some way," he said. "That's what I find so gratifying about doing this. Whether or not my song about, say, Wyoming sounds the way yours might if you were to write one, if it inspires you to look a little more closely at your own relationships to the places in your life. The work is so much less superficial if it encourages someone to look more closely at the world."

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